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Contested Globalization: the Changing Context and Normative Challenges

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Contested Globalization: the Changing Context and Normative Challenges Review of International Studies (2000), 26, 131–153 Copyright © British International Studies Association Contested globalization: the changing context and normative challenges RICHARD HIGGOTT Introduction Even leading globalizers—that is, proponents of the continued liberalization of the global economic order occupying positions of influence in either the public or private domain—now concede that in its failure to deliver a more just global economic order, globalization may hold within it the seeds of its own demise. As James Wolfenson, President of the World Bank, noted in an address to the Board of Governors of the Bank in October 1998, ‘… [i]f we do not have greater equity and social justice, there will be no political stability and without political stability no amount of money put together in financial packages will give us financial stability’. An economic system widely viewed as unjust, as Ethan Kapstein recently argued, will not long endure. These views, of course, are not new. Adam Smith himself acknowledged in Wealth of Nations that no society could survive or flourish if great numbers lived in poverty.1 If globalization in some instances exacerbates, and in other instances gives rise to, new forms of injustice, then the meaning and scope of justice is no longer self- evident. Nor indeed are the means by which it is to be achieved. We are thus forced to consider again the nature of justice. But it must be a conception of justice that relinquishes the Westphalian co-ordinates. If the territorial boundaries of politics are coming unbundled, to use Ruggie’s evocative phrase,2 then it is inevitable that our conceptual images of politics will become similarly unbundled. Conventional accounts of justice have failed to address the changing nature of the social bond. Rather they have supposed the presence of a stable political society, community or state as the site where justice can be instituted or realized. Indeed, it is often assumed that a stable political order is a condition of justice and justice requires a clear site of authority and a clearly demarcated society. In short, conven- tional accounts of justice have tended to assume a Westphalian cartography of clear lines and stable identities; they have assumed a settled, stable social bond as a necessary condition of justice. In so doing conventional theories of justice— essentially liberal individualist theory (and indeed liberal democratic theory more generally)—have to date limited our ability to think about political action beyond the territorial state. 1 Ethan Kapstein, ‘Winners and Loses in the Global Economy’, International Organization, 54:2 (2000), pp. 359–84. 2 John G. Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization, 47:1 (1993), pp. 139–74. 131 132 Richard Higgott But what if a stable bond should no longer exist?3 If under conditions of globalization the very fabric of the social bond is constantly being rewoven, then can these givens of justice still pertain? Do the forces and pressures of modernity and globalization, as time and space compress, render the idea of a stable social bond improbable and, if so, how are we to think about justice? What happens to justice when social, economic and political conditions destabilize the social bond? When the social bond is undergoing change or modification as a consequence of globa- lizing pressures, how can justice be conceptualized, let alone realized? Can there be justice in a world where that bond is constantly being disrupted, renegotiated and transformed by globalization? What are the distributive responsibilities, if any, of states under conditions of globalization? What should be the role, again if any, of the international institutions in influencing the redistribution of wealth and resources on a global scale? These are serious normative questions with which the modern political philo- sopher—with few exceptions—has yet to engage in a global, as opposed to bounded sovereign, context.4 They are thus not questions to which this article, authored by someone untrained in political philosophy, can make a major contribution. But we can take another tack, one located more in contemporary political practice, that can offer some insight into the prospects for greater global justice. We can do so by arguing that these questions, by default and in the absence of settled ethical positions, are also ‘governance questions’. By starting with governance, rather than first principles grounded in ethical philosophy, we may be proceeding in the reverse order of logical procedure. But, in the absence of institutions of governance capable of addressing these questions, justice (no matter how loosely defined) is unlikely to prevail. In short, we lack a basic structure at the global level that can make provision for some kind of elemental distributive justice. In this context, therefore, the general aim of this article is to ask a series of questions about the nature of contemporary global governance that assumes a need for greater distributive justice at the global level for the world’s poor, but without elaborating the details of what that greater justice (other than advances in poverty alleviation) might look like. The article will examine the current policy debate on global governance issues to see what change, if any, is in train and what impact any such change is likely to have on advancement in the direction of greater global justice. In this regard the article offers a narrative account of some recent changes in the agenda of global governance. In addition, the article tries to capture the flavour of change in intellectual thinking about these issues. Specifically, it argues that we are seeing a ‘mood swing’ in both the theory and the practice of international political economy, indeed international relations in general, at the dawn of a new century. The outcome of this mood swing is a greater concentration in the international policy community on the ‘governance’ or ‘management’ of globalization than was 3 This supposition is discussed in Richard Devetak and Richard Higgott, ‘Justice Unbound? Globalization, States and the Transformation of the Social Bond’, International Affairs, 75:3 (1999), pp. 483–98. 4 For some exceptions see Andrew Linklater, ‘The Evolving Spheres of International Justice’, Charles Beitz, ‘Social and Cosmopolitan Liberalism’ and Henry Shue, ‘Global Environment and International Inequality’, all three of which appeared in a special 75th anniversary edition of International Affairs, 75:3 (1999). Contested globalization: the changing context and normative challenges 133 apparent in the more fundamentalist free-market days of the last two decades of the twentieth century. But it is the specific argument of the article that there is a difference between governance and politics. The principal limitation of the global governance agenda at the beginning of the twenty-first century is shown to be the underdeveloped nature, if indeed not suppressed nature, of its understanding of the salience of politics. Politics, in the context of the emerging global conversation about governance, needs to be understood as not only the pursuit of effective and efficient government, but also as a normative, indeed explicitly ethical, approach to the advancement of a more just agenda of global economic management. In the 1980s and 1990s free market liberalism (what Ulrich Beck calls ‘globalism’5), as practice and process, was largely left to private sector corporate actors. The scholarly agenda on globalism was almost exclusively set by the economist. But following a series of striking ‘trigger’ events in the late 1990s— notably the financial volatility that beset the global economy in general and the states of East Asia, Latin America and Russia in particular—a new view is emerg- ing. For its advocates and detractors alike, globalization as the grand narrative of the contemporary age (which I take to include not only the ideology of globalism, but also an understanding of the phenomenon of shrinking economic and political space) is now too important to be left to the private sector and the economist. More polemically, globalization cannot simply be driven by the neoliberal economic agenda. This is not merely the (often long-held) view of politically marginal analysts residing in departments of international relations, political science, sociology and cultural studies. It is now recognized across the political spectrum, and indeed within the mainstream economic discourse, that globalization has to be politically legiti- mized, democratized and socialized if the gains of the economic liberalization process are not to be lost to its major beneficiaries.6 There are a range of ways to explain this changing climate of opinion in the domain of both practitioner and analyst. They are discussed in the first section. But the central aim of the article is to ask where this mood swing is taking us. Specific- ally, where does the relationship between globalization and governance (this time defined as a more ethical politics) head over the next decade? The argument presented here is that it must transgress the divide between the simple profit- maximizing approaches of the ‘real world’ of corporate capitalism that dominated the policy world in the late twentieth century and the more reflective, but largely ignored, normative interest that prevailed in the academy. The time for a serious marriage of normative and applied policy work in international political economy (indeed international relations in general) is at hand. In specific terms the interests of the theorist and practitioner of the market must meet seriously the interests of the normative theorist of international politics in a manner that has not occurred since the heyday of Keynesianism. If we take the signals of growing resistance to globalization of the late 1990s to be salient, markets must start to deliver what citizens want or continue on a fraught road to increasing delegitimation and contest. In the past, interest in the question of legitimation has 5 Ulrich Beck, Was ist Globalisierung? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997).
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